Monetize Your Site

This post is intended to be both informational and instructional, but the true instructional part may come a bit later for me. I am in the process of updating my Pennies for Wink site. The site was my first foray into a promotional site. I had little knowledge and several misconceptions when I put the site up.

I have added a few pages (none live yet) that every proper site should have. I am adding some content in the form of additional catalogs. I am using several Amazon stores integrated into my pages with iframes. The catalog pages work well and look like they are actually part of the site, but all of that content is actually on Amazon servers. That means that there is nothing for the search engines to index.

As a start to getting some possible search traffic I am building a directory page. The catalogs will all be accessible from my left nav pane, but the directory page offers an opportunity to produce a paragraph of content for each catalog that I write up. There are also links directly from the blurb paragraphs to the catalog pages.

I have been researching low competition keywords that have a reasonable amount of search traffic for these descriptions, and having moderate success in finding terms. The next item is to work the keywords into my paragraph in a natural sounding, flowing sentence. For the most part this is working as well. Of course, the test will be if I actually get any traffic that is directed directly to the directory page. If I see that kind of traffic then I will be able to proclaim that keywords do, in fact, command the respect given them.

I will need to support this site with more content locally and also some articles syndicated through the article directories. It will be interesting to see the result.

What do you do to promote traffic to your site? Leave me your wisdom in a comment!

There is a sister site to Selling on Your Website called Before You Buy a Website. There was some good content, but only a few articles on the site. I looked the site over and decided that in view of the target audience for the site perhaps some information on Web Basics would be in order. I started with five or six topics that I wanted to cover, but the list kept growing. As I was writing the articles I kept thinking of other topics that should be covered. There are over a dozen new articles in the new section.

The site was originally intended to give some information to those who run across a for sale sign on a site or see an auction for a site. I suspect that many of those people might not know a great deal about the workings of the web or websites. The information that I have offered there might help to clear some of the mystery for some people.

I also added some other features to the site to make it a more worth while place. I hope that you will check it out.

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I have just finished installing a Do Follow plug-in and the KeywordLuv plug-in on this blog. I do have comments set to manual approval for all posts, so a comment will not appear until I do approve it. I am pleased that you checked out the blog and I invite you to leave a quality comment that expresses your opinion on the material in the blog or on the main site. I have also installed these plug-ins on my blog on my Before You Buy a Website site.

Thanks!

Wink

I am adding some reprinted articles to the site. When I run across some good information in one of the article directories that may be of interest to my visitors I am adding them in the Reprinted Articles section of the nav pane. This will add to the information available and will be filtered to insure relevance to our site topic.

I have purchased the keyword tool, Micro Niche Finder. I have been doing searches for various niches. I am about to embark on a multi-front attack on making a few dollars on the Internet. I will be pursuing both AdSense and affiliate income and see which way I can produce the best results. The research is interesting, and I have identified several potentially profitable opportunities.

I have also had a few articles published by the article aggregator sites and have seen some increase in traffic from these efforts. I have most of the pieces of the puzzle in place, it is just a matter of execution. There is potential to make a few dollars over the winter months if I apply myself to the task. I shall let you know how I fare.

I have posted an article on html semantics and SEO on the main site. I just wanted to announce it here so that it will hit the RSS feed. The anchor text links directly to the article. Thanks!

While is was in the Selling on Your WebSite mode I wrote one more new article today. I discuss the importance of maintaining your focus if you choose to become an Internet Marketer. You can go to the site through the link in the footer to read the articles.

I redid the css to style the headings in the content area as I wished. I don’t understand why it was not working as I had it set up, but it was not. I added separate rules for the selectors and now things are behaving as they were intended. I must need to learn something more about the css for multiple selectors in a rule. When things did not work properly I did go and check on the proper format and I thought that I had that right, but it did not work as planned.

For all of you faithful readers that have been waiting with baited breath for my next epistle, the day has finally come. I have put up a new page on the main site this evening. The title of the new page is shared with the title of this post. I have gone into the necessity of targeting traffic to your site. In future episodes I will suggest methods to use to target your traffic. Click to see this article.

While I was knocking about the site I did some minor updates to the site to bring it in line with my latest design standards. These changes will be only slightly visible and should have no effect on the operation of the site, but I want to maintain all of my sites using my current best practices. Since I was doing something with the site anyway I made these adjustments at the same time.

I have just posted a new article to the main site. The article discusses the importance of knowing your traffic. I noticed today, as I was checking yesterdays traffic, that one search term was drawing traffic that was not well targeted to my site. Fully half of the search engine traffic was looking for something completely different than the information I offer on that site. That suggests that there may be an unexploited niche centered around that keyword. Well, I am off to research that niche. I already checked and a good domain name is available.

I have just completed an overhaul of the main site (almost). On checking I see a couple of things that I still want to do, and there is much additional information to get up on the site. The site does have a new look and, I think, all functions as intended. If you would like to take a peek you can click here for the main page.

I rearranged some of the information. I thought that the home page was too long and had too much diverse information, so I broke it up into three chunks by major topic and embellished them a bit. I have a SEO article in the works and that is what precipitated the site update. I wanted to get it done before I added more pages because they would just have to be updated later if I put it off.

Go check out the new layout and then come back and leave a comment about how you like it. Also, if you find something that doesn’t work let me know.